Water Girl succeeds because it understands the universal through the culturally specific. It is a story about Ogbanje children, yes, but also about the ways human beings grapple with tragedy, search for meaning, and try—desperately—to reconcile faith, grief, and the randomness of existence.
By Joseph Jonathan
West African cosmologies have never drawn a clean border between the seen and the unseen. Across cultures, mythologies, and oral traditions, there lingers a shared understanding that life does not move in a straight line but often circles itself—repeating, returning, refusing finality. The stories of “children who come and go” exist deeply in this space: children who slip in and out of the world at will, grief returning to the same family like a familiar visitor.
Among the Igbo, these children are known as “Ogbanje”, spirits who deliberately die and are reborn into the same family, each returning to reopen the wound of the last. Their power lies in the “Iyi-ụwa”, a physical object that binds the child’s spirit to the earthly realm and enables the cycle of reincarnation.
Among the Yoruba, they appear as “Abiku”, children suspended in a perpetual liminality, torn between the lure of the spiritual realm and the demands of human existence. The Akan of Ghana, with their conception of “Ababio”, extend this belief toward familial reincarnation, naming male children whose spirits have returned from the ancestors.
It is from this deep reservoir of belief—part mythology, part social memory, part communal psychology—that Nnamdi Kanaga draws the narrative of Water Girl. And in weaving this story, he demonstrates what it looks like when a filmmaker approaches African cosmology not as spectacle or novelty, but as an interpretive framework through which people actually understand their experiences, their tragedies, and their emotional inheritances.
Water Girl follows Nkechi, played with remarkable control and aching maturity by Stella Damasus. Nkechi discovers that her daughter, Kamsi (MoriyahFaith Jackson), is bound to the cyclical existence of the Ogbanje: a spirit child caught in the loop of life, death, and return.
Despite being set in the wide, snow-frosted landscapes of Montana, Water Girl remains firmly tethered to its West African roots. Kanaga’s film is unafraid to carry its cultural weight across continents, exploring themes of grief, loss, disillusionment, and the very human impulse to search for supernatural explanations when natural ones feel too insufficient—or too cruel—to confront.
Through a series of carefully placed flashbacks, we follow the emotional arc of Nkechi’s miscarriages before she finally gives birth to Kamsi. These scenes are not merely narrative tools; they are windows into the collapsing emotional architecture of a family. One scene, after what appears to be yet another failed medical consultation, shows Nkechi storming into her home. Her husband, bewildered, asks why she left (the doctor’s office) so abruptly. She responds sharply: “I didn’t want to listen to any more of her ‘there’s nothing wrong with you’ crap.” The line is simple, but it carries decades of cultural subtext—African women often find themselves caught between medical language that dismisses their pain and traditional explanations that finally validate it.
Kanaga stages this tension without condescension. Rather than reducing the Ogbanje phenomenon to superstition or psychological projection, the film treats it as something that exists in dual registers: culturally symbolic and narratively real. In Water Girl, the Ogbanje cycle is not an abstract belief; it manifests through water, the very element that binds Kamsi to the spirit world. This link is rooted in Nkechi’s desperation years earlier, when she prayed and made offerings to a water spirit before finally carrying her pregnancy to term.
The film suggests that the spiritual contract forged during Nkechi’s grief is inseparable from the supernatural disturbances that follow. But even with this metaphysical grounding, Water Girl remains attentive to how families interpret tragedy — how they oscillate between medical explanations and spiritual ones, not because one is inherently truer, but because both offer different forms of coherence in moments when life refuses to make sense.
Kamsi, meanwhile, carries her own cross. She is plagued by recurring nightmares, jolting awake from scenes that are equal parts memory and haunting. Beneath this psychological turbulence lies a deeper wound: her crushing guilt over a childhood accident that claimed her father’s life. In one of the film’s later emotional peaks, she confesses to her mother that she believes the accident was orchestrated by her Ogbanje spirit. Nkechi, firm in her love and her own interpretation of events, rejects this explanation.
Their exchange is a microcosm of how people grapple with life’s randomness. Humans are meaning-seeking creatures; we reach instinctively for the supernatural when faced with the unbearable. Even when the answer is simple, natural, even tragically mundane, we tend to fortify it with spiritual scaffolding, because the idea that a loved one died by chance is far more frightening than the idea that some greater, unseen force was at play.
By staging this conversation, Water Girl reflects a broader cultural truth: African spiritual beliefs often fill emotional voids that Western rationality cannot. These systems of thought provide language where medicine offers silence.
For all its tension and somberness, the film is not without warmth. Kanaga threads moments of youthful softness through the relationship between Kamsi and Jennings (Oliver Haeden). Their scenes—filled with playful banter, awkward affection, and the tender hesitations of high school love—serve as emotional reprieve. They remind the audience that Kamsi is not merely a metaphysical concept or the embodiment of a curse; she is a teenager struggling to claim a life that constantly slips from her grasp.
Kanaga also deserves credit for the film’s linguistic integrity. Although the story unfolds in Montana with an international cast, Water Girl employs the Igbo language without caricature, dilution, or performative exoticism. The language appears authentically, as a natural extension of character and background.
In a global cinematic landscape where African languages are often tokenised or misapplied, Water Girl’s approach feels refreshing—an insistence that cultural authenticity is possible even outside the geographical homeland.
The acting performances, for the most part, shoulder the weight of the film’s heavy material. Damasus rolls back the years with a performance that proves why she dominated our screens from the ’90s through the early 2000s. She plays Nkechi with the sort of hardened tenderness that only an actor comfortable with emotional complexity can pull off. Jackson delivers an adequate and often affecting performance as Kamsi, embodying guilt and longing in a way that makes the character genuinely sympathetic. Oliver Haeden’s presence brings lightness, though he also grounds the story’s youthful subplot with sincerity.
Cinematographers: Jennings Barmore and Reid Morth, contribute significantly to the film’s emotional register. Their visual approach is defined by clean framing, restrained movement, and a minimalism that lets the characters breathe. The Montana landscape is not aesthetic wallpaper; it becomes a visual metaphor for isolation, ancestry in exile, and the feeling of being spiritually displaced even when geographically settled.
The film’s sound design and musical score further strengthen its grounding. Rather than overwhelming the narrative, the score rises and recedes with intentional subtlety, echoing the film’s themes of haunting, cyclical return, and emotional turbulence. The minimalist aesthetic—visually and sonically—keeps the film intimate, even when its themes stretch into the cosmic.
Ultimately, Water Girl succeeds because it understands the universal through the culturally specific. It is a story about Ogbanje children, yes, but also about the ways human beings grapple with tragedy, search for meaning, and try—desperately—to reconcile faith, grief, and the randomness of existence. Kanaga does not treat West African mythology as a distant relic or a plot device. Instead, he treats it as a living inheritance, capable of travelling across oceans, entering new homes, and evolving without losing its essence.
In its best moments, Water Girl transcends its supernatural premise to explore something far more human: the emotional debris that remains after loss, the struggle to hold onto family in the face of forces we cannot understand, and the quiet hope that the cycles which bind us can, someday, be broken.
Rating: 3.9/5
*Water Girl continued its strong festival tour by screening at the Eastern Nigeria International Film Festival (ENIFF) 2025 where it won the award for Best Narrative Feature.
Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @Chukwu2big.